Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 October 05 • Wednesday

Payroll (1961) is a British movie about an armored car heist. I like movies about armored car heists. Payroll wasn't quite as exciting as I had hoped but it has its points of interest. (Le Convoyeur is probably going to be the best armored car heist movie I see this year.)

Most heist movies build up to some kind of snag that forces the thieves to change their plans. This is where Payroll begins.

This gang is all set to steal the £100,000 payroll from, um, some place I can't remember, with the help of an inside man. But the first scene in the movie shows the new armored car company that's taking over the payroll delivery, with a vehicle that's like a tank on wheels in direct radio contact with the police.

The leader of the gang is all efficiency and determination. He's so disciplined and so hard working that he won my sympathy, just as the Jackal in The Day of the Jackal won me over just by being so damn committed.

The heist itself comes in the first half of the film. A closed road and resulting traffic jam threaten to derail the careful plans of the thieves but—with the help of the police, ironically—everybody makes it to their places on time. The armored car is sandwiched between two trucks that ram it over and over again from both sides until it cracks open.

This doesn't work out so well for the people inside. The driver is killed. One of the crooks is killed by the shotgun-armed man in back of the armored car.

This brings us to one of the other points of interest. Despite the usual difficulty of getting the members of the gang to keep cool after the heist, the leader looks like he might get away with it. He certainly doesn't have to worry about the police. In an unusual plot development—especially for the time—the armored car driver's widow takes the law into her own hands.

Even if the crooks get arrested, she figures, they'll just go to jail. And her husband, the father of her children, is dead.

The remaining point of interest was this awesome photocopier, the Thermo Fax Secretary Copying Machine.

Good thing it was only in one scene because it totally stole that scene!